The Never Ending Process of "Coming Out"

Yesterday was the 31st anniversary of National Coming Out Day - a day to celebrate coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.  Truth be told, however, when one is LGBT, the "coming out" process is not a one time event.  It happens over and over again as one has to first admit reality to one's self and then over time to coming out to family, friends, at work, and thereafter, every time one meets someone new, assuming you feel it necessary and/or worthwhile to reveal this truth about yourself.  Some times it is worth the effort, other times it is easier to reference "my spouse" rather than to say "my husband" and run the risk of awkward questions or outright rejection.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, it can be exhausting and can be more about others' expectations than self-affirmation.  Over time, it does get easier once one develops an "I don't give a damn" attitude towards what others think.  Yet, coming out remains something the straight world cannot comprehend since no one straight ever has to "come out."  My thoughts and best wishes go out to the LGBT individuals beginning the never ending process. Here are column highlights:   

Since college, I’ve come out countless times: in office meetings, to roommates, at dinner parties, to baristas and doctors and anytime it seems necessary.

Since 1988, there has been an official day for coming out: Oct. 11. But the reality is that queer people have to come out over and over and over again. It’s exhausting and frankly sometimes not worth it. So I’m not always out. Maybe someone asks me if I have a wife, and I simply say no. Maybe a friend’s child asks what gay is, and I say they should ask their parents. Maybe I check “rather not respond” on hospital forms about sexuality. Maybe I don’t tell and hope that others don’t ask.

In asking gay friends — and lesbians, bisexuals, trans folks and closeted people — about their similar experiences with this exhaustion and coy, post-out closetedness, a recurring frustration was that as soon as queer life is broached, straight people often act entitled to ask personal questions. Are you a top or a bottom? Are you postoperative? Do you have a penis? Which do you like more, men or women? There is a tyranny there that conscripts queer people as servants to straight awareness, paid intermittently in the minimum wage of tolerance. Queer people would never do this to straight people; we’re not allowed.

This is the trap of coming out, the way it squirms under the weight of straight expectations. Coming out is embraced only as otherness . . . . my interrogators have almost never put any effort into their curiosity before unloading it on me. Because it’s not about learning my truths; it’s about fitting their scripts.

Openness was a radical act of self-empowerment in Harvey Milk’s day, when gay existence was just shy of insanity and plague. But a half-century of pride later, coming out has become increasingly about other people. When Apple chief executive Tim Cook came out, he quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ” Sure. But our outness is for us, not them. We have lost the spotlight in our own story.

What’s more, we have collectively believed the lie that coming out, as a moment of actualization, is exclusively a personal journey rather than a societal one. Our celebration of coming out forces queer people alone to do the hard work and emotional labor of changing the country. Meanwhile, Americans are raising persistently gendered blue and pink kids. No matter our pride, outness still costs us Uber rides, YouTube dollars, our health care, our ability to parent, the roofs over our heads and, in 28 states, our jobs (this past week, the Justice Department argued that the Supreme Court should allow businesses to treat outness as a fireable offense nationwide, condemning queer livelihood to straight mercy).

No wonder that high-profile athletes and musicians who come out often do so only after they’re off the field (football player Ryan Russell) or after their song has danced atop the charts (“Old Town Road” singer Lil Nas X). The Brooklyn Nets forced center Jason Collins to accept a series of 10-day contracts after he came out. Actor Sean Hayes didn’t come out until after the original run of “Will & Grace” concluded (and he scored his Emmy). It is a vanguard that cowers — maybe by necessity.

Thankfully, the coming-out playbook is being rewritten — if imperfectly — by prominent people from Jodie Foster and Aaron Schock to Lil Nas X and Janelle Monáe. Without officially coming out, Foster and Schock (a former congressman) skipped to being out, forcing others to process "what this means" on their own. It's a mix of bravery, subversion and evasion. . . . . All four are out in deliciously contradictory ways.

This last part underscores the truth that there is no monolithic way of being LGBT.  We are as diverse and varied as those in the straight world despite efforts to stereotype us.

National Coming Out Day: Stigma Against Gay People Can Be Deadly

With my husband in the Windsor Suite of the Greenbrier Resort. 

Today is National Coming Out Day which operates on the concept that one of the most basic forms of activism is to "come out" to family, friends and colleagues and live an authentic life as an openly lesbian or gay person. Stated another way, homophobia thrives in an atmosphere of silence and ignorance, and that once people know that they have loved ones who are lesbian or gay, they are far less likely to maintain homophobic or oppressive views.  I came out roughly 17 years ago and lived through periods when Virginia's sodomy law was still binding law and when same sex couples could not marry. (For the record, I am also the survivor of two serious suicide attempts driven by the adverse consequences of "coming out.")

Obviously, ending homophobia runs directly counter to the efforts of the Trump/Pence regime and the Republican Party to continue to demonize gays and lesbians and to role back LGBT rights.  These efforts are aimed in part to endear the GOP and Trump/Pence to Christofascists who continue to use the bogeyman of LGBT rights as their number one fundraising scare tactic.   Nowhere in the calculus of this vicious agenda is the very real harm done to real people.  A piece in the New York Times by a licensed physician looks at the documented harm such homophobic efforts cause.  I maintain that these "godly Christian" folk care little about "religious freedom" and instead are focused on inflicting cruelty on those who are different, even if such cruelty drives individuals to suicide.  Here are article highlights which look at the harm being done to individuals and often their families:

I’ve never been sure what to expect when meeting someone who’s just tried to take his own life. But I’ve learned to stop expecting anything.

Yesterday, my patient, a 20-something graduate student, swallowed a jumble of unmarked pills, hoping to die, after his father told him never to come home again. Today, he greeted me with a soft smile, his delirium starting to clear, his heart beating normally again.

“Whoops,” he said.   He’d been a happy kid who aimed to please. He once felt so bad for lying about having done his homework before playing video games, he told me, that he’d grounded himself. Sociable but square, he didn’t drink until he was 21, even though he’d gone to a college with a reputation for partying. Deeply religious, he was gay but desperately wanted not to be.

Now his father’s disavowal pushed him over the edge, capping a string of stigmatizing experiences at home, at school and at church. He’d had enough.

For decades, we’ve known that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals experience a range of social, economic and health disparities — often the result of a culture and of laws and policies that treat them as lesser human beings. They’re more likely to struggle with poverty and social isolation. . . . . L.G.B.T. youth are three times as likely to contemplate suicide, and nearly five times as likely to attempt suicide.

Some of these disparities have interpersonal roots: social exclusion, harassment, internalized homophobia. But often they stem from an explicit denial of rights: same-sex marriage bans, employment discrimination, denial of federal benefits.

Sexual minorities living in communities with high levels of prejudice die more than a decade earlier than those in less prejudiced communities.

But civil rights advances and growing public acceptance of L.G.B.T. individuals in recent years are among the more transformative social changes in modern American history. And evidence increasingly suggests this shift has measurably improved health care access and health outcomes for L.G.B.T. populations.

The halting, patchwork nature of L.G.B.T. rights expansions across the country has allowed researchers to study the effects on health and well-being by comparing states that expanded rights to those that failed to introduce protections, or actively curtailed them.

After Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2003, mental health visits dropped significantly for gay men across the state. Other states that followed suit saw a 7 percent reduction in suicide attempts among L.G.B.T. adolescents. Nationwide, legalization of same-sex marriage is linked to increases in the likelihood that gay men have health insurance and a regular doctor to see.

By contrast, in states that passed same-sex marriage bans in 2004 and 2006, L.G.B.T. individuals experienced a marked rise in mental health problems, including anxiety, alcohol use and mood disorders. (No such increase was found in neighboring states that did not pass bans.)

But it’s more than just marriage. L.G.B.T. individuals who live in states where it’s legal for businesses to deny people service based on their sexual orientation have a higher risk for mental health problems. One study found a 46 percent increase in the proportion of sexual minorities reporting depression, anxiety and other emotional problems in states that passed denial-of-service laws. Again, no increase was observed in states without these laws.

But there’s reason to believe progress in L.G.B.T. health may be imperiled by a political and social environment that is growing less friendly toward sexual minorities. More states are trying to pass “religious liberty” laws that allow for discrimination based on gender and sexual identity. Several federal health surveys will no longer include questions about sexual orientation, making it more difficult for researchers to study disparities. And the Trump administration recently established a new division in the Department of Health and Human Services to defend health professionals who refuse to provide care to people or in situations that conflict with their personal beliefs, which could include the right to treat L.G.B.T. individuals. (L.G.B.T. patients already face discrimination at concerning rates.

I think of my young patient in the hospital bed who had attempted to kill himself. I remember the pain that remained even as the toxins he ingested left his body. And I worry that a new wave of anti-L.G.B.T. rhetoric and policy will mean that he — and people who love like him — will end up feeling more stigmatized, in poorer health, or no longer with us at all.

Reflections on National "Coming Out" Day 2017 - Why It Still Matters

It has been 16 years since I commenced my "coming out journey when I first began to reveal to family and friends that I was gay after many years of internal strife and immeasurable amounts of self-hatred engendered by my Catholic upbringing.  Since that time, I typically reflect on the state of my own life and other members of the LGBT community on October 11th, National Coming Out Day.  Past illustrative blog posts can be found here and here. For those unfamiliar with the term, National Coming Out Day was first observed in 1988 as a form of activism to fight against homophobia and anti-LGBT discrimination.  It can be described as follows according to Wikipedia:

[A]n annual LGBTQ awareness day observed on October 11 and October 12 in some parts of the world.  Founded in the United States in 1988, the initial idea was grounded in the feminist and gay liberation spirit of the personal being political, and the emphasis on the most basic form of activism being coming out to family, friends and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person. The foundational belief is that homophobia thrives in an atmosphere of silence and ignorance, and that once people know that they have loved ones who are lesbian or gay, they are far less likely to maintain homophobic or oppressive views. 

Some now argue that the observance is no longer needed given the advances in LGBT rights.  In fact a thirty something college professor at a liberal university makes such and argument in a column in the Washington Post today.  I respectfully beg to differ.  Strenuously, despite the seeming good intentions of the author.   The reality is that today the LGBT community finds itself under unrelenting attack.  Last Friday a law became effective in Mississippi that makes anti-LGBT discrimination legal and gays can be turned away for business, hotels and public accommodations, and, of course fired from their jobs.  At the national level, the Trump/Pence regime has declared war on the LGBT community and is both rolling back legal protections and under the ruse of "protecting religious liberty" granting Christian extremists a license to discriminate akin to what is now fully legal under Mississippi's foul law.  Here in Virginia, we are faced with a Republican statewide ticket that, if elected, would bring such anti-LGBT discrimination to the fore in Virginia (GOP attorney general candidate John Adams would work to rescind same sex marriage rights).

While LGBT citizens may lead much safer lives in liberal states, large cities and university towns than was the case in 1988, things are still frightening in much of so-called fly over country and even in places like Southwest Virginia.  

As one of the linked posts notes, my coming out saga when I came to realize that I just could not continue to live my life as an actor on a stage if you will, pretending to be something that I was not through no choice of my own. I had to either to do something about my situation and “come out” or kill myself. I chose the former, unwittingly almost on National Coming Out Day.  Along the way, I did end up having two serious suicide attempts motivated by my desperation to escape some of the bigotry LGBT individuals face, including being fired from my law firm and the ruinous financial nightmare that was triggered.

I survived, but sadly, many LGBT individuals succeed in taking their lives on a near daily basis.  Often, they are only in their teens and see suicide is the only way to escape relentless bullying. It saddens me greatly to know that a number of gay teens will never know the freedom I have eventually found because they chose to end their lives.  They simply saw no other option thanks to the bigotry that still thrives in "red America." 
 

Just as disturbing is the reality that studies indicate that 40% of homeless youth are LGBT, perhaps the majority having been thrown out of their homes by their "god fearing" parents.  And yes, LGBT individuals continue to be fired from their jobs due to their sexuality or gender identity - I routinely get calls form those who have been fired.  All of this remains perfectly legal in Virginia and 28 other states.  Until these situations change and the laws change to provide full equal protection for every LGBT American, National Coming Out Day is still sorely needed.

On a personal note, I am largely at the place I imagined and envisioned in my mind's eye that I wanted to achieve when I started my coming out journey. I am married to wonderful guy who truly loves me, I now work at a law firm where my sexual orientation is not an issue - my burgeoning Hindu client base only care about me taking care of their legal needs and some have LGBT family members - and my husband and I are active activists in the LGBT community (see the photo above).  In short, I am  "totally out" and no longer feel the need to hide or apologize to anyone. It can "get better" and through National Coming Day we need to continue to make sure it gets better for every LGBT individual.   There is still so much work to be done.  There are literally lives to be saved.

Facebook: The Number and Rate of People Coming Out Increasing

Click image to enlarge

Surveys have shown that the Millennials are leaving religion in droves.  Now, Facebook has more bad news for the Christofascists and professional Christian crowd: the number of people coming out via Facebook is increasing at a significant pace and looks to perhaps triple in the coming year.  Making this news all the worse for these hate merchants is the reality that as people come out there is a ripple effect of friends and families rethinking the homophobia that has been a staple of the "godly folks" propaganda machine.  And as more people become gay accepting, the fear of others to come out diminishes and hence the accelerating rate.  Towleroad looks at Facebook's findings.  Here are excerpts:

Facebook reports that more than 6 million people have come out of the closet as LGBT on the social media network to date, including 800,000 who have done so in the past year. Furthermore, they report that the rate at which people are coming out is increasing, as are the numbers.

The social media network released the data in response to National Coming Out Day.  They write:

Over the past year, approximately 800,000 Americans updated their profile to express a same-gender attraction or custom gender. Further, not only has the total number of Americans who have come out on Facebook risen dramatically, but so has the number coming out each day. As the chart demonstrates, the number of people on Facebook coming out per day is on track to be three times what it was a year ago.

This graph also shows periods in which there are sharp increases in the number of people coming out on Facebook. The most obvious increase is seen following the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, indicated by the red vertical line. On a typical day, one out of every ten people who change their “interested in” status on Facebook do so to reflect a same-gender interest.

Another interesting data set shows the number of people who are out as LGB or T state by state, revealing that New York and Nevada have the most out people, while states in the deep south (not surprisingly Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana) have the least amount of out people:

This is all good news for progressives.  For the Christofascists and their political whores in the Republican Party it ought to be a wake up call that their anti-gay agenda is a form of slow suicide. 

Today is National Coming Out Day

Unwittingly, eleven years ago almost to the day I came out to my former wife.  It was the first step on what would prove to be a long turbulent journey.  Admittedly, I was clueless at the time on many gay rights issues that I write about all the time now.  All I knew was that I could not go on living my life like some actor on a stage playing a role that wasn't the real me.   The stress of always maintaining a glass wall between myself and the world was becoming simply too much to handle.  Add to that the emotional and psychological damage done to me being raised Catholic and my foolishly believing the "pray away the gay" myth, and suicide really looked to be the only alternative to finally trying to face who I really was.  Since taking that first initial step, the intervening years have certainly seen triumphs and tragedies.  But I have accomplished one thing: a level of self-acceptance and peace with who I am that had eluded me for nearly five decades.

I know from the e-mails I receive or even from venturing into gay chat rooms, that there are still so many individuals who are not "out" and still living their lives in various levels of fear of discovery.   It is a scary place to be.  I've been there.  But coming out is not only liberating, it is also the strongest form of activism that one can undertake.  Living out and proud is a daily testament that the lies and smears told about LGBT individuals are not true.  Being out is truly the most powerful way to alter hearts and minds.   It's not always easy and, yes, it can be terrifying at times.   But it beats the hell out of staying in the closet.

 

Helping a Child Come Out

October 11th is National Coming Out Day - a day that recognizes a process that far too many adult LGBT individuals have yet to successfully navigate as evidenced by any gay dating site where likely more than half of the participants indicate that they are "not out."  Ironically, unless one lives in a Christianist household or a backwater like southwest Virginia, it seems that younger LGBT individuals have an easier time "coming out" than older folks.  Perhaps because for the younger generation being gay isn't the big issue it is for older folks or perhaps because nearly 30% of the under 29 set have walked away from organized religion which is the main purveyor of anti-gay bigotry.   Or perhaps it is because more parents - except for Christianists who likely seek "ex-gay" snake oil cures or disown their child - are coming to realize that they have a gay child and need to take a supportive role for them.  An article in the New York Times looks at the trend in parents seeking to support rather than condemn their children from the perspective of the father of a gay son.  Here are highlights:

THURSDAY, Oct. 11, is National Coming-Out Day, an annual celebration of living openly for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

Some people approach this particular square on the calendar with pride and courage, others with trepidation. Then there’s a third group, which gazes at the day with an uncomfortable blend of longing and impatience. These are parents who know, deep down inside, that a son or daughter is almost certainly gay, but hasn’t worked up the nerve to open up about it. And many of them want to scream, “Would you just come out, already?” 

Parents aren’t blind, and the clues are often there. Some research suggests that sexual orientation can show itself even at 3 years old. In our family, by the time our youngest son came out at 13, my wife and I had long progressed from inkling to conviction.

Whether the parents might embrace or reject a gay child, families naturally tend to avoid difficult subjects — and so a stalemate ensues, with many parents worrying that the act of concealment could be taking a psychic toll on their child. 

Considering the growing support for gay rights, as well as the rise of openly gay public figures and sympathetic roles in television and movies, people might be forgiven for thinking that it’s no big deal to come out these days. But the process of announcing your sexual orientation to the world can still can be a minefield, said Ilan H. Meyer, a professor at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles. 

“Coming out and coming to terms with being gay is easier now, but it’s a matter of degree and not a complete reversal of the world,” Professor Meyer said. He studies what he refers to as “minority stress” and its effect on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Along with the fear of being rejected or attacked, he has said, such stresses include strain of concealing sexual orientation and inner fears of a second-class existence. “Gay kids do suffer consequences for being gay, and having to deal with social attitudes that are not accepting of them,” he said.

The strain of it all plays out in difficult and even risky ways, Ms. Kahn noted; studies suggest that gay teenagers have higher rates of suicide, depression and drug and alcohol abuse than their straight counterparts. The reasons, she explained, include the stress of being different and being spurned by friends and family. “It’s not like gay kids are wired to do any of that,” Ms. Kahn said. “It’s the sense of being stigmatized.” 

Once children are out, the pollsters for the Human Rights Campaign found, they tend to be exposed to higher levels of “frequent” verbal harassment (name calling) at school than those who stay in the closet. Seventeen percent of respondents who say they are openly gay encounter the harassment; while only 12 percent who are not openly gay reported the frequent harassment.

[A]s tough as it may be to be an openly gay child, it’s even harder to be closeted. Among those surveyed, 41 percent of those who are out to immediate family said they are “very happy” or “pretty happy,” while just 31 percent of those who said they had not revealed themselves could say the same.

[T]hey also suggested that we make it clear that however our son turned out, we’d accept and love him — and to work references to gay life into our daily conversation instead of treating it as a touchy subject best left alone.   We did, and Joseph came out to me one evening when I had taken him out for sushi at a local restaurant; he was telling me about ways that he unsettled the other boys by dropping comments like, “Do you think Josh has any idea how attractive he is?” I asked if maybe he wasn’t trying to tell them something — and asked if he might also be trying to tell me something. “I might be,” he said. And so we knew. 

Soon he came out at school as well. That was rocky at first — in fact, almost catastrophic — but today, at 16, he’s a more comfortable, happier boy. 

The most important thing, Ms. Kahn said, is that parents need to find ways to let their children know that their love is unconditional, and that their home is a safe place where anything can be discussed. Adolescence can be a secretive time, but “it’s the role of the parents to try to create the open path,” she said. “The adults have to do a little work here.” 

Even coming out in mid-life as I did, the fear of parental rejection was terrifying.  Thankfully, my parents never wavered and stood by me.  Sadly, too many parents do not follow their example and instead reject their children due to religious based brainwashing or due to self-centered concern over "what will people think of Me" rather than concern for their child. 

Coming Out - Ten Years Later

This blog began as a form of therapy for me and a means to share my coming out journey with others in the hope that it might help others to avoid my missteps and to help others know that they are not alone no matter how alone they may feel in darker moments.

That said, today to the best of my calculation marks the tenth anniversary of the day I first came out to my former wife. Prior to that date I had struggled for the better part of thirty nine (39) years trying to convince myself that what I knew in my heart about my sexual orientation was not really true. As part of that internal mental contortion process, as long time readers know, I married and fathered three children> In addition, I tried to be everything that church and society told me I should be. Over time, however, it all began to fall apart and I came to realize that I just could not continue to live my life as an actor on a stage if you will. I had to either to do something about my situation and “come out” or kill myself. I chose the former, unwittingly almost on National Coming Out Day.

So very much has changed since that fateful day a decade ago, not the least of which is that I have achieved a level of self-acceptance that had previously eluded me all my life. That’s not to say that such self-acceptance and inner peace with who I am came easily or overnight. I first had to overcome a sense of shame about being gay and a sense of failure that I had not been able to keep up the role playing and had thereby failed my children. In addition, I had to rebuild a future even as my world as I had known it crashed and disintegrated all around me. And along that path I seriously flirted with suicide when my sense of failure and an unknown future overwhelmed me.

Contributing to the sometimes nightmare like journey, I also had to deal with being forced from my law firm for being gay and a nasty and contentious divorce. Coming out is likely never an easy process, but coming out later in life definitely entails additional challenges both in terms of one’s former spouse and one’s children. Is the ordeal worth it? I say without reservation that, yes, it is. It’s impossible to put a price on one’s soul and self-acceptance. And to me, remaining in the closet is a form of selling one’s soul. How did I survive the process? Here are a few highlights.

First, I will readily admit that without the efforts of two wonderful therapists I would perhaps never overcome the sense of shame and failure and made it through the coming out process. One, an ordained minister, helped me rid myself of shame and the brainwashing/psychological abuse of the religious tradition in which I had been raised. Leaving that faith tradition for one more accepting of LGBT individuals also played an important role in the process. Remaining in a church setting that denigrates you constantly is extremely unhealthy. The other therapist played the much needed role of someone who could be objective when I was unable to be objective and who could help me to believe that I did indeed have a future (even if the details were not yet known). The particularly unwavering support and love of one of my children also played a critical role.

When I came initially came out I had a picture in my mind’s eye of what I wanted: a committed monogamous relationship with a wonderful man with whom I could be complete emotionally and in terms of my sexual orientation. The difficult part for me was to find a way to believe that what I envisioned and longed for would actually happen in time, particularly since when I came out, I knew virtually no one in the local LGBT community. Too often during my darkest days – and I had many of them - I saw the future as a black empty screen. It was very hard at times to remain positive and making the coming out journey was arduous.

But the longer term reality is that I did achieve my vision. I am happily partnered with one of the sweetest individuals that I have ever known. Like all couples we have our differences and frictions, but overall, he is everything that I wanted. And I have a great relationship with my children even though things were difficult at times during the contentious divorce. The lesson in hindsight is to be patient – not my strongest suit – and to believe in yourself and that you DO have a positive future. It is also important to realize that building a new life takes concerted effort and that you have to take the initiative to make things happen. Getting involved in the LGBT community and LGBT activism was a life saver for me and it truly allowed me to rebuild my social world and helped my law practice in the process.

For those coming out tomorrow and in the future, remember that you CAN survive and find happiness. It will involve hard work and rejection by some, but it IS worth it. It's terrifying at times but so wonderful to finally live one's life as it was meant to be lived.

Gays To Help The Disadvantaged and Sick in Conjunction with National Equality March

I received a press release from the Empowering Spirits Foundation, Inc. ("ESF"), a non-profit, non-partisan grass-root based civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, whose members engage in service-oriented activities in communities typically opposed to equal rights. In working side-by-side with non-LGBT neighbors these neighbors may come to see similarities rather than differences in each of themselves and members of the LGBT community, engage in dialogue through non-confrontational means, and come to promote equality. I have often said that by putting a face and personality out to people - as opposed to some stereotype - we have the best opportunity to open hearts and minds. Here are some highlights from the press release:

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The Empowering Spirits Foundation (ESF), a national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization will hold its “Proud Hearts Reach Out” service events across the nation on October 10-11, 2009, in conjunction with Coming Out Day and the Equality March on Washington.

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The ESF has partnered with Habitat for Humanity, the American Cancer Society, the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society, MyOutSpirit.com, and others to engage in service oriented events designed to allow LGBT individuals to work side-by-side with non-LGBT members in an effort to open up communication between both sides.

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“ESF is proud to be working with various organizations to address many of the major issues facing Americans today; affordable housing, inadequate healthcare, and a lack of funds for neighborhood revitalization,” said A. Latham Staples, President and C.E.O. of the ESF. “Regardless of whether you are gay or straight, these issues affect everyone. And for those in the LGBT community who are unable to attend the national march, this is a great opportunity to help others in need, and in doing so we can engage in dialogue through this non-partisan manner in an effort to promote understanding and equality.”

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We are a part of this community, our families are here. Our well-being and our lives are intertwined with everyone else in the community. And our spirituality demands that when we can help, we do so, while our integrity demands that we aid without hiding who we are.”

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What: Empowering Spirits Foundation’s “Proud Hearts Reach Out” events

Where: Nationwide, 36 states

When: Saturday, October 10, 2009, & Sunday, October 11, 2009

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Volunteers are asked to visit www.empoweringspirits.org to R.S.V.P. For more information on the San Diego event or an event being held in any other city please visit www.empoweringspirits.org, email events@empoweringspirits.org or call (858) 523-8201.

Straight Spouse Network Supports National Coming Out Day

Having been previously married for many years, I know all too well the ordeal involved in coming out to one's spouse and family. I also have observed the sense of being cheated that a straight spouse feels at learning that their marriage, while not a sham, was not and never could be what they had hoped and dreamed for. Often, the straight spouse feels that they have been the victim of the gay spouse. This feeling is understandable even if not accurate. On my part, I never had any intention of hurting my ex-wife or causing her unhappiness. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe both spouses are the victims: victims of a homophobic society and a majority religious tradition that forces people like me to try ever so hard to conform and be what they are not. The so-called "ex-gay" programs increase the likelihood of gays trying to be straight and in the process causing hurt and turmoil to the straigth spouse. Sadly, the "ex-gay" programs care nothing about the innocent straight spouses placed in untenable marriages, the sole focus being to maintain the bogus "choice myth." Thus, it is noteworthy that the Straight Spouse Network has come out SUPPORTING National Coming Out Day. Here are highlights from PR Newswire:

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The Human Rights Campaign has declared October 11th as National Coming Out Day. On this day, members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community -- and those who love them -- will celebrate the opportunity for them to live openly. A new voice (from what many might think is an unlikely source) has joined in support of this basic human right: the voice of straight spouses -- men and women who have been or are married to LGBT people.

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Why are straight spouses supporting National Coming Out Day? "Many concerns of a straight spouse relate to anti-gay and anti-trans attitudes and behaviors in communities across the country," says Kathy Callori, Executive Director of the Straight Spouse Network. "They, and their children too, are often stigmatized or isolated in social or religious groups. They also fear their LGBT partners will lose their jobs or community status if they come out publicly."

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To end the practice of closeting in marriage, straight spouses have added a heartfelt pitch to Coming Out Day 2008: "Let LGBT persons come out as equals -- a human right." For the same reason, SSN [Straight Spouse Network] as an organization supports same-gender marital unions.

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It is estimated that up to two million gay, lesbian, or bisexual individuals have married or will marry. In addition, an unknown number of transgender persons marry. When they come out, their spouses feel ignored, betrayed, and sexually rejected. Most family members and friends, even professionals and clergy, do not understand their pain or minimize their concerns. Each straight wife or husband must heal the wounds caused by the unexpected disclosure while undergoing their own identity crisis in isolation.